Hire the right people, empower them to make customers happy. This is the story of one tiny kindness strengthening the Southwest brand, for one customer. Staff like Carol, here, help to explain why among all U.S. carriers, only Delta has a larger market capitalization than Southwest (and Delta’s fleet’s almost twice a big!)

Last month I found myself in a dilemma that’s common (for me). I was on a Southwest flight; it was the beginning of a long day, so when the flight attendant came by taking drink requests, coffee was in order.

Now, I have to admit that airline coffee’s gotten better, overall, over the last few years. But creamers haven’t. So when Carol asked me if I wanted ‘cream’ I plaintively asked, “Do you have milk?”

“No,” she replied, “we have those little creamers.”

Call me a snob, but my problem with those things is, I don’t care for dairy substitutes with a dozen or more ingredients including mold inhibitors and partially hydrogenated oils.

When the flight attendant saw the look on my face, she leaned in conspiratorially and said, “I have some of my own half-and-half in the galley. I’ll bring you some of that.”

And a few minutes later when she returned with my coffee, she also had a cup with an inch of creamer that had once actually been inside a cow.

I was reminded once again that front line staff are always in a position to create an incredible brand experience, if they’re given the freedom to creatively respond to customer desires.

From ‘Build a Brand Like Trader Joe’s’

The fact that Southwest didn’t have a little carton of milk or half-and-half in the service cart – that they instead carry something better called ‘whitener’ than ‘cream’ was, admittedly, a small problem for me. But it wasn’t something I took personally.

The thing is, when Carol brought me a bit of half-and-half from her personal stash, that was personal. It was a moment when a front-line customer-service staffer made a personal connection, and showed she cared.

I will probably never get on a Southwest flight again without thinking, at least for a moment, about the time a flight attendant improved day just that little bit, by doing something just for me.

It’s almost hard to remember, these days, that Amazon started out as an online bookstore. Unless you run bricks-and-mortar bookstore. In that case, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Amazon accounts for about half of all books sold in the United States.

Over the last ten years, while hundreds of independent bookstores have opened and flourished, Barnes & Noble has closed about 1/5 of its locations. Book publishers know that while the behemoth struggles, it is still crucial to building visibility for new titles.

Riggio originally purchased one Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York City, and grew it to a 700+store chain. Ironically, he took B&N public within a few months of the Jeff Bezos launching Amazon, in 1994.

Over the next decade into the mid-2000s, nearly half of all U.S. bookstores closed. But then a strange thing happened: Small, independent bookstores stopped closing and shrinking. Now, quality independent shops are flourishing on the strength of local relevance and curated selection.

The same can not be said of Barnes & Noble, which many observers feel has lost its way. So the question is, Can Barnes & Noble scale the same techniques used by independent booksellers to successfully compete against Amazon?

The answer: Yes. And the model is Trader Joe’s, which succeeded in building fantastic brand loyalty by hiring the right customer service staff, encouraging customer interaction, and empowering staff to create great customer experiences. In ‘Build a Brand Like Trader Joe’s’ (yes, available at Amazon!) I point out that TJ’s hires for attitude and then trains for aptitude. If you’re a cheerful extrovert, TJ’s doesn’t care whether or not you can work a cash register or quickly bag groceries.

The same approach would work for Barnes & Noble, if they’d only try it. Imagine a well-staffed Barnes & Noble store with literate, helpful employees. “You’re looking for ___? Let me show you where that is." Then, as the staffer walked to the right stack with the customer, he or she'd add, "You know if you like that author, you should try reading ___?”

The real beauty of this strategy is, can you imagine a more under-utilized resource than recent college grads with literature and other humanities degrees?

The Toyota Canada Foundation recently funded a project by the Canada's Traffic Injury Research Foundation, to research older drivers' attitudes towards "limited, self-driving, semi-automated vehicles (LSDVs)". Although TIRF's final report never defines an LSDV, my reading of the report suggests that the survey is about SAE Level 3 automation. That means that they conducted a survey about a whole category of vehicle automation that most experts now feel should not be put on the market.

The problem with this kind of partial automation is, as the SAE notes in its own definition of Level 3 Automation, that "The driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times with notice". As recent examples including high profile Tesla 'Autopilot' and Uber fatalities show, one thing human drivers are terrible at is that "take control" assignment. We're OK at maintaining control, but we suck at fiddling with the temperature control, checking our Facebook status, putting on lipstick and then, suddenly, grabbing the wheel when our 'autopilot' suddenly can't handle some urgent traffic situation.

And, let's be honest, that's not the kind of thing older drivers can possibly be expected to do any better than young ones.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big proponent of automated vehicles. I'm quite sure that lower levels of automation will be especially appreciated by, and useful for, older drivers. When fully autonomous vehicles are available, senior mobility and quality of life will be measurably improved.

This survey, which was pretty extensively picked up and reported upon, however, adds no meaningful insight. In addition to asking questions on the wrong topic, by focusing on a degree of partial automation that few experts now feel should even be attempted, it asks the wrong questions anyway. Seniors have, it turns out, pretty much the very same concerns younger drivers have. But like most such surveys this one pretends that drivers will step out of their current cars and into vehicles with far higher levels of automation, with no acclimation process at all.

That's not how life works. Later adopters will see self-driving cars on TV, get rides in self-driving cars, know people with self-driving cars, and have many opportunities to form opinions about such vehicles before they consider buying one, or riding in one on their own.

The health care category rarely comes in for approval here @BrandROI, but Humana caught my attention the other day at the gym, when I looked up to see a commercial that begins with an older guy jogging–but in a mysterious way, marked by a lot of sudden and inexplicable changes of direction.

The denouement comes when we realize that the old guy’s been using something like Under Armor’s MapMyRun app, and has been drawing a picture for his wife.

One proof that this is a great ad is that when I mentioned it to my wife while we were sitting on an airplane, the young guy in the seat beside her piped up, “Yeah, that was a good ad.” That Millennial liked it because the mystery of what, exactly, the old jogger was going caught his attention.

The reason I liked it was that it was a strikingly different (and positive) portrayal of two older consumers. The jogger wasn’t just in shape, he was also portrayed as tech savvy and creative, and still obviously in love with his wife.

Who gets the extra bonus point for not casting 50-somethings as 60- or 70-somethings? Did that come from BBDO? Production Company Superprime’s Molloy Brothers who are credited with directing the spot? Or even someone at Humana?

Enquiring minds would like to know more about this commercial, so Revolutionary Old Idea emailed Liz Hemmer, BBDO New York’s media relations maven, in the hopes of interviewing the team that produced this excellent spot. I hope BBDO gets back me. In the meantime, watch and learn how to market to mature consumers, without falling into ageist tropes and stereotypes.

This actor's wrinkles made me think, "Cool! A spot that presents a savvy, attractive woman, without trying to mask the fact that she's at least 50. But on repeated viewings, I realized Campbell's V8 commercial was guilty of reverse ageism.

Any ad industry types who are over 50 remember the classic “I could’ve had a V8!” commercials that Campbell’s aired beginning in the 1970s.

That’s a tough act to follow if you’re an ad creative, but I can’t believe how much material there is for me to write about in the ‘Nutrition Competition’ spots Campbell’s released last winter.

The first thing that leapt out at me, about both spots (there’s one directed at men and one at women) is that the trim and attractive V8-drinking protagonists are both well into their 50s, and they’re competing against much younger rivals who are all caricatures.

In the men's version of the spot, a trim Baby Boomer beats two cartoonish bodybuilders.

In the female version of the spot, a 50-ish woman (cheered on by two friends who appear to be 30- and 40-something) competes against a Millennial and her friend. The basic premise is straightforward; it’s a race to see who can consume two servings of veggies first. When the announcer says, ‘Go’ the older woman opens a bottle of V8 and chugs it. Meanwhile the Millennial phones in a fancy made-to-order juice… only to be interrupted by the confetti cannon that indicates the competition’s over.

The spot closes with a close-up of the smiling winner—a beautiful woman no doubt, but they’re not trying to hide her crow’s feet.

That’s what first captured my attention about the spot. How refreshing, I thought, that first, Campbell’s cast a mature actor and second, they definitely didn’t retouch out those wrinkles.

But when I sought out the ad and watched it a few more times, and did a little research into who the actors were, I realized there’s way, way more to write about.

It’s clear that Campbell’s has done the math and realizes that the average age of a V8 consumer is 60-plus. So of course they cast a mature woman as the winner of the Nutrition Competition. What’s interesting to me, however, is the way they’ve cast and portrayed the loser(s).

Campbell’s didn’t hold back, either. That Millennial brunette is Christina Masterson (better known as Emma, from Power Rangers Megaforce.) As the competition begins, she and her friend are smugly on their phones, dialing up ‘Juice Universe’, but before they get around to ordering their rutabaga smoothie, that woman who’s their mom’s age has already kicked their butts.

The spot’s worthy of a frame-by-frame analysis but I’ll focus on this one-second glance from Masterson, in which she looks over at her older rival and nearly rolls her eyes, as if to say, This is gonna’ be so easy—but it communicates so, so much more. Those older women don’t even have their phones out; they’re so out of touch.

In a marvelous bit of writing, direction, and acting, one look from the Millennials says, We’re young, we’re with it, we’re sexy, and you’re… well you’re just not. But even in 15 seconds there’s time for a second plot point and reversal, when the Millennials are reduced to pathetically complaining, “That’s not fair!”

After spending a decade railing against ad industry ageism, I was instinctively drawn to a spot in which a beautiful mature woman (she's on the cusp of Gen-X and the Baby Boom) wins out over the conventionally hot Millennial. But things got even more interesting when I tried to determine the actual age of Angela Nicholas, the actor who Campbell’s cast as their 50-something female protagonist.

I still can't pinpoint her age. But Googling her name quickly established that she was the Penthouse Pet of the Month in August, 1985. Even if Bob Guccione shot her the moment she turned 18, she’s now over 50. But wait, there's more: As Angela Davies, she went on to have a career in 1990s soft porn (NSFW link) which certainly hasn’t hurt her when it comes to being cast in TV commercials—she’s appeared in spots for Kay Jewelers, Del Webb, and Hunt’s (dinner sauces) among other national brands.

If anything, Angela Nicholas’ background makes Christina Masterson’s dismissive glance even more tragic. Knowing what we know about Angela it’s, like, No, you’re not hotter than she is, either; you’re just young and stupid.

That dismissive glance from the Millennial girl is all the more pathetic when you consider the history of the older woman. Sure the Millennials are young and hot now, but they'll never be photographed-by-Bob-Guccione-himself hot.

All that’s kind of fun to write about. I can’t blame Campbell’s for wanting to create a spot in which a Gen-X/Boomer protagonist wins out over Millennials. And I love that they’ve cast the beautiful Ms. Nicholas—an actor with a backstory that makes her even sexier.

But I’m in the unfamiliar position of criticizing these commercials for their reverse ageism

I’m sure V8 consumers skew older. But why go out of your way to antagonize younger consumers? Eventually, the brand will need to attract new customers. There had to be some way to have the mature consumers win without it coming at the expense of typecasting the younger ones as self-obsessed dimwits.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is often (mis)quoted as having written, “There are no second acts in American lives.” What he really wrote was more along the lines of, “I used to think there were no second acts, but...”

Hampton Fancher, who shares a screenwriting credit and has the sole story credit on ‘Blade Runner 2049’ doesn’t just prove there are second acts, but third and fourth ones. He’s been a professional flamenco dancer in Spain, a successful actor in TV westerns, and had a sparse but notable screenwriting career in the late ’70s, which included adapting Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” into the iconic sci-fi classic, ‘Blade Runner’.

He had a falling out with director Ridley Scott, however, and nearly had his name removed from the original film’s credits. That didn’t do his career much good; from the late ’70s until he was in his 70s, the phone hardly rang. But when it finally did, in 2012, it was Ridley Scott

Scott, who also directed the recent ’Runner reboot is another near-octogenarian.

Fancher spent much of the time between the two Blade Runner movies teaching screenwriting. He’s the subject of a documentary film called ‘Escapes’, although at the rate he’s going, that too may spin off a sequel.

Fancher says that he’s got a few more finished screenplays. “Since they’re knocking on the door again, maybe I’ll open it.”

Are a large percentage of older consumers a drag on the economy? Or are the people who say that just dumbbells?

Here at ROI, we pay particular attention to economic news coming out of Japan, because that country is sort of the canary in the aging-population coal mine. So, it’s somewhat heartening to read that Japan recently posted its sixth consecutive quarter of economic growth. The results of the most recently available quarter correspond to an impressive annualized growth rate of 4%.

According to the CIA Factbook, Japan’s population has the second-highest median age, at 46.9, of any country. Only Monaco’s is higher, and Monaco’s population is heavily skewed because it’s a retirement haven. Germany has nearly the same median age, but Japan has a much higher percentage of senior citizens: According to WorldAtlas.com, 26.3% of Japan’s population is over 65.

It may not be as bad as all that. But we have to wonder whether the idea that aging consumers are inherently a drag on the economy is a product of ageism, or a cause of it?

We regularly encounter cassandras decrying the impact of aging consumers on the U.S. (and Canadian, and European) economies. But Japan’s aged population has apparently not doomed it to permanent recession. According to Bloomberg and the New York Times, Japan’s recent growth was driven by increased domestic spending, and matched by a significant increase in business investment. That’s good news. Japan’s economic managers would now like to see an uptick in inflation, hopefully caused by increased wages.

Japan’s economy’s improvement probably should be credited to a large public spending program, and the country’s very large public debt probably should not be glossed over. That’s another reason Japan would benefit from increased inflation – as inflation effectively lowers the interest rate on sovereign debt.

The people who worry about the effects of an aging population here in North America really have nothing to complain about. The median age of the U.S. is a sprightly 37.8 years, and it will likely never reach Japan’s or Germany’s current levels. [Pew projects the U.S. median age will reach 42.2 in 2065.]

If you just heard a shriek of terror off in the distance, it may well have been conventional grocery store owners reacting to news that Amazon’s just purchased Whole Foods.

The $42-per-share, $13+B deal places a large premium on Whole Foods and certainly suggests that Amazon’s ‘Fresh’ experiment whetted the online retailer’s appetite in the grocery sector. I’ve seen estimates that Amazon sold about $350M worth of groceries last year. That’s not chicken feed, but it’s peanuts compared to Whole Foods’ sales, in the $15B range.

OK, I’ll try to rein in the food puns. But seriously…

So far, U.S. grocery shoppers have been a little resistant to buying groceries online—this is especially true when it comes to produce, or dairy and other things that need to be kept cool. By contrast, in Great Britain, about half of all grocery shoppers have tried buying groceries online, and over 10% of them report doing virtually all of their shopping online.

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods suggests that it feels Americans can be convinced of something similar. (At the very least, Amazon certainly overpaid, if one considers this to be only or even mainly a bricks-and-mortar proposition; Whole Foods’ stock’s been under pressure for the last few years.)

One thing Amazon may have considered is that the aging population plays to the strengths of the online grocery model.

Seniors are less enthusiastic about driving, navigating huge grocery store parking lots, and trekking around with heavy bags of groceries. I know from the experience of people in my own family that shopping online and having groceries delivered can be critical to independent living.

Although many online retailers are obsessed with younger consumers who they perceive as ‘digital natives’, the truth is that mature consumers spend more online than millennials. And as the vast majority of Baby Boomers plan to age in place, it seems inevitable that the grocery business will catch up to other retail sectors in terms of the percentage of sales that come from online purchase and delivery.

It's rare for me to watch a TV spot in which an older consumer's cast to type, and still be unable to decide how I feel about it. But that's the case with a recent Samsung Galaxy S7 VR ad created (I think) by 72 and Sunny.

I could not find an easily embeddable version of this ad but you can watch it here

In the spot, a group of teenagers seem to be trying the Gear VR headset for the first time. An older consumer asks what they're doing, and asks to try the headset. The kids immediately let him try, giving the spot a friendly, intergenerational vibe.

But of course the old guy's typecast as the one who doesn't know from VR gear. And then there's his accent; he's from somewhere else. I suppose the spot can't technically be racist--after all the group of kids is diverse--but is there's a whiff of culture-ism; people from somewhere else can't be as with it as we are.

At one point, the kids literally laugh at the old man, but the spot manages to create the impression they're laughing with him, not at him.

I would have loved it if the old man had been showing his Gear VR system to the woman on the park bench, and had the kids come up and ask what it was, and have them try it. I doubt that idea or anything like it was pitched in the agency brainstorming session, but on balance I feel this ad's generally warm-hearted vibe and strong execution manage to (just) skirt ageism.

The amount of student loan debt held by senior citizens has increased by over 500% over the last decade. Perhaps surprisingly, only about 20% of that debt was accumulated by their children.

What age cohort has the highest percentage of their student loans in default? People over 75

Nearly $20B is owed by seniors in about 750,000 households. I.E., the average debt load is north of $20k per indebted household. Expanding the definition of mature student loan debtors to those over 50 increases their share of total debt to over 15%.

That is, admittedly, a small percentage of total student loan debt, but seniors’ share of total debt is growing and, alarmingly, people over 75 have very high rates of default.

It’s hard to tease the average length of these loans out of the available stats. A lot of this debt was accumulated by baby boomers who borrowed money for college way back in the ‘70s and haven’t paid it back. The problem is, if seniors retire before they retire their federal student loan debts, The Man can garnish up to 15% of Social Security payments!

Many seniors’ student loans were taken out more recently, by people who were middle aged when they were laid off ten or fifteen years ago. They followed accepted wisdom and retrained. The problem is that people returning to school in the early 2000s accumulated far larger debts than they did the first time around—because tuition and other educational costs have dramatically outpaced inflation since their first rodeo.

Statistically speaking, seniors are obviously less likely than millennials to be hobbled by student loan debt, but if trends continue, there will soon be 1,000,000 million senior households in just that situation.

That’s just another illustration of this truth: Whenever you think, “That’s a young person’s problem,” or “That only applies to young people,” or “Only kids are concerned with…” you’re almost certainly wrong. That thing—whatever it is—is almost certainly relevant to quite a few seniors, too.

Baby Boomers, many of whom are now senior citizens, are often mocked for endlessly complaining that "The world's going to hell in a handbasket". Well, a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Leonhardt used data gathered by a Stanford University economist (Raj Chetty) to prove that things are getting worse... for Millennials.

The implication of this graph is that about half of all children born in 1980 were born to the lowest 30% of income-earners.

Chetty used millions of anonymized federal income tax records, dating back to 1940, to calculate a sort of 'American Dream' factor: That is, the odds American children—once they'd matured to age 30—would earn more than their parents had earned at that age.

What he learned was that for the first few decades after WWII, most Americans grew up to become wealthier adults than their parents had been at that age. (And most of the 30-somethings who didn't earn more than their parents had at that age weren't hurting anyway; they were usually 1%ers who were still making well above-average incomes.)

Although the probability of growing up to earn more than your parents gradually decreased from the 1940s through the '70s, the American Dream of increasing prosperity held true for most Baby Boomers and a lot of Gen Xers.

But children of the 1980s—Millennials—can't expect to earn more than their parents and Chetty's data gives no real hope that future generations should expect to earn more, either.

This is one more nail in the coffin of the oldest marketing truism: That you should direct your ads at younger consumers, because they're not only the ones who'll live to buy your brand longer, they're the ones who are going to have more money to spend in the future.

The young consumers of the future seem likely to be even more cash strapped than the young consumers of today. But go ahead; just keep alienating us mature consumers—the ones with all the money.

Apple picked a great moment – in the nail-biting seventh game of the World Series – to unveil a 60-second spot for the iPhone 7 starring a still-anonymous senior citizen.

The :60 (which cost $1M to broadcast once in the World Series) was created by TBWA, and shot at the spectacular aquatic facility built for the Barcelona Olympics. But the decision to cast a senior citizen as a star – in a spot where he’d be wearing a bathing suit, no less – was even more striking than the cost of air time or the setting.

I asked TBWA about the spot, but the agency has not yet replied to my enquiries. The action begins at poolside, where a 60-something bather is lounging beside a 20-something woman. The older man turns up the volume on his iPhone speakers (demonstrating the impressive volume the unit can put out) and lays it carelessly in a small puddle (demonstrating, I presume, water-resistance).

Then the dude makes the long climb to the 10-meter platform, striding imperiously past another older gentleman; handing his sunglasses to a baffled kid; not deigning to even glance at a young guy with a man-bun. He pauses briefly at the edge of the platform. It’s not clear whether this is all for that (much) younger woman’s benefit or not.

He launches himself from the platform and for a moment, it seems we’re about to see an epic belly flop. But at the last moment, he snaps into a vertical entry and rips a pretty good dive.

“What the heck did I just see?” I wondered, when this spot appeared in Game 7?

The ad has a kind of Wes Anderson/ironic feel, and if you think about it the old diver’s a bit of douche, turning the speakers up like that. But he is clearly the hero of both the ad and his own life.

On the face of it, it could be an ad specifically directed at older male consumers. That’s not a crazy assumption. According to Slice Intelligence, men outspend women, and men over 65 are the top spenders (per capita).

That said, seniors account for less than 25% of Apple’s device business. So it’s far more likely that TBWA’s casting choice was driven by the desire to create a spot that stands out. In that sense, ironically, the diver is striking because he is so unexpected as a character. He’s unexpected because the ad industry is otherwise so ageist.

So where does this leave us here at Re:? Well, the spot currently has a 99.3% positive rating on iSpot.tv which is outstanding, and it’s been viewed well over a million additional times on YouTube. I’d have to say it’s a win for TBWA and Apple, and give it an ‘Eh!’ grade, because even if the senior’s being exploited, he’s being exploited in a way that other senior consumers – especially men – are gonna’ like.

The company cited the top-10 equities held by each group (including equities held in mutual funds and ETFs which were, in turn, owned by members of each generation.)

Not surprisingly, all four generations' top-10 lists skew heavily towards the largest American companies by market cap. (Note that TD Ameritrade customers trade on US exchanges almost exclusively.) As such, only 16 companies, in total, figure on all generations' top-10 lists.

Of all the companies mentioned, only Tesla is not amongst the 50 largest US companies by market cap; it was the #10 choice among Millennial investors. Presumably Millennials can afford a few Tesla shares, but not a new Tesla.

Top 10 investment holdings by generation: It's a tribute to the strength of brands that almost every one of these companies is immediately recognizable by its logo alone. (Exceptions: BH logo is the logo of Berkshire Hathaway's specialty insurance business, although Warren Buffett's a big believer in brands, his own brand is low key. Altria is on right, third from bottom. Big Tobacco doesn't want you to recognize that one, so you're excused.)

Notwithstanding the similarities in each generations' Top-10 holdings, TD Ameritrade's customer cohorts have not had similar YTD performance.

Millennials have earned a 5.35% return

Gen X-ers: 9.1%

Baby Boomers: 8.7%

Seniors: 10.2%

TD Ameritrade doesn't offer any suggestions as to why Seniors have had twice Millennials' success, in terms of return on investments to date. I can think of several possible explanations: Seniors may be more likely to be active investors, choosing individual equities; Millennials may be choosing mutual funds and paying higher fees. Expenses like trading fees also take a relatively bigger bite of smaller purchases.

Still, the Seniors' top returns call into question the old investing truism that as investors age, they should (or do) become more conservative.

Regular visitors to this site will know that I routinely excoriate ad agencies for creating ads that portray mature consumers as a sad bunch of losers. We’re portrayed at best as clinging to fading youth and at worst as doddering from one drug dose to the next.

For at least a decade, I’ve been genuinely baffled by such portrayals, which fly in the face of my own direct experience and that of my friends.

There’s an obvious ‘Happiness Gap’ between the way mature consumers are portrayed in ads, and the way we actually feel. I blamed that gap on the mindless ageism of the ad industry but I recently had an ‘aha’ moment when I realized that it’s not ad creatives’ fault. They can’t be blamed for their misconception.

Now, I blame this U-shaped curve.

This graph is adapted from "A Snapshot of the Age Distribution of Psychological Well-Being in the United States" by Arthur A. Stone et al. For the complete study -- one of many that confirms the existence of the famous U-shaped curve for happiness -- go here.

Across all cultures and socio-economic groups, research has shown that people’s happiness and enjoyment of life typically decreases from early adulthood until middle age. Then, sometime in people’s late 40s or early 50s, their happiness begins to increase. Their sense of well being (WB, in the graph) continues to increase until the last few years of life.

Considering our current life expectancies, that means North Americans experience three decades of progressively increasing happiness, after they enter middle age.

Why is this relevant to ad business?

The more I think about the U-shaped curve, the more I realize that it supports my argument that young creatives can’t possibly be expected to really understand mature consumers.

It’s not just that they lack direct experience of being mature consumers. It’s worse than that. Because from the time you get your first job in the ad business, you’re on the happiness downslide. Less and less happy; less and less satisfied; more and more worried.

When young creatives extrapolate their own experiences, it's bound to color the impression they have of older consumers. And it helps to explain why advertising portrays older consumers as sad sacks hanging on only to see the grandkids graduate from middle school.

Nothing could be further from the truth. But by the time those young creatives realize it, they will have aged out of the ad business!

People in their 60s – I know, I am one – routinely say that they’re happier now than at any previous age. Or, at least, happier than they’ve been since they were children. Consumers in their 60s and 70s don’t want to recapture lost youth. Time and time again they tell surveys they’re happy right where they are.

You know who wants to roll their age back? People in their 30s and 40s, who miss being in their 20s. IE, people with hands on creative jobs in the ad business.

Ironically, right around the time ad creative would finally realize that older consumers are, if anything, happier than most younger consumers – around the time they’d start crafting ads based on a real appreciation of mature consumers’ emotional lives – creatives get laid off, fired, or otherwise are forced out of the business. They cede their jobs to a new generation of young creatives who, again, dread getting older for a very good reason: in their own experience, getting older = becoming more and more stressed and unhappy.

Florence 'See See' Rigby is the oldest practicing nurse in the United States. She recently turned 90.

Rigby has spent her entire nursing career in one hospital, Tacoma General. She began there as a student in 1946. She retired once, at the age of 67, but got bored and returned to work after a few months.

"She runs circles around all of us," Sheri Morris, assistant nurse manager, told TODAY.com. "She's a wealth of wisdom and knowledge, and we absolutely love her."

Rigby seems to have been ahead of the curve, as it's only now that a lot of Boomers are finding that the whole idea of being retired is unattractive, since they haven't yet gotten tired in the first place. Nursing's a tiring job, of course, and the fact that she can still do it at 90 suggests that she's an extraordinary specimen. Tacoma General's also to be commended for realizing that older (or in Rigby's case, way way older) employees have value precisely because of the wealth of experience they've accumulated.

This awesome insight comes from the (perhaps literally) insightful folks at Pornhub...

Among male visitors to the Pornhub site, 'Mature' is a more popular search term than 'Anal'. Meanwhile, walk into any ad agency and you're 20 times as likely to meet an asshole than anyone who is middle-aged. The inescapable conclusion? Even porn addicts are less ageist than the advertising business.

Go ahead, pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about, but in the same report, Pornhub points out that the average American visits their site over 120 times per year. If you work in the ad business and really don't know what Pornhub is, you should be fired, because you don't understand the culture you're selling into.

But seriously, folks... 'Mature' is the #3 search term for male users. And it's in the top-10 for female users (who account for over 1/5th of all visits, interestingly.) What does this mean? It means that even the pornography business is less ageist than the advertising industry.

I was listening to NPR the other day as Terry Gross interviewed Dan Lyons.

On Twitter, he's @RealDanLyons, which is kind of a nod to an earlier stint with—if not fame exactly—a kind of cult status as @FakeSteveJobs.

Lyons, who was born in 1960, had a distinguished career as journalist in the tech sector, including stints as the tech editor at Forbes and Newsweek. But a few years ago, when Lyons was 52, Newsweek laid him off. The print journalism world Lyons came from has been as disrupted by online media as the ad world's been. Lyons realized that he wasn't just going to be able to find a replacement journalism job—at least, not at a salary that would support his family.

So, he turned to the industry he'd been covering, and got a "marketing" job at HubSpot—one of the myriad companies offering recipes to make spam palatable. His experiences on the inside of a typical startup illustrate the new business model for most contemporary tech companies; mainly, it's a lesson in the fact that most founders' exit strategy precedes any commitment to actually adding value to customers' lives or businesses. His book also explains that the tech business is nearly as ageist as the ad business.

Fired at 52, trying something new in a company where he was about twice the average age, then writing a best-seller about his experiences... that alone would justify calling out Dan Lyons as one of re:'s 50 over Fifty. But that's not all, because he's since made another way better career move; he's now a screenwriter on the hot HBO series 'Silicon Valley'.

Attaboy, Dan.

One thing really stuck with me, after hearing his Fresh Air interview, was Dan's response to Terry Gross—playing the devil's advocate—and suggesting the tech industry is justified in its ageism.

GROSS: Do you think that some of the emphasis on being young, too, is kind of drawing the line between people who are digital natives and people who aren't? You know, like, people who grew up with computers and so a lot of things are just second nature to them in a way that older people had to learn from scratch because it was introduced to them. It wasn't something they grew up with.

LYONS: I think there's validity to that. But there's also this - the way it's described is almost like everybody born after 1980 has a gene that the rest of us don't have, that they were with born with this thing that somehow they can understand this.

Now I do know my kids are very good at picking up new things, and they're learning how to code in Python. And I am not a coder at all, but I'm pretty sure I could learn to write code in Python pretty quickly if I had to.

And I think it's not just that. It's people who have been working as coders, as programmers, as engineers who get kicked out when they turn 40 or 45. They have tech skills, they have degrees in computer science. It's not believable to me that they couldn't learn whatever the new programming language is.

Also, they - they've put in those 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talks about to gain expertise in a skill. Why would you not want them? They've learned their skills on someone else's dime, and now you can hire them and get the benefit of all that experience.

This is, of course, just as true of the ad industry. I wonder what the Millennial response would be if that 'digital native' attitude was turned on its head, and Millennials were immediately dropped from consideration from any position that involved direct interaction with other people.

I can imagine conversations that go something like this...

"Well Courtney, you're doing a great job here in our digital content department, but we can't really consider you for a manager's role. You see, managers need interpersonal skills, so we only really consider older workers who are Analog Native. It's not your fault that you grew up interacting only with devices and not people..."

"But that's just prejudice," Courtney would protest. "I could learn to have face-to-face conversations."

Much has been made of the way Bernie Sanders has galvanized young voters. Exit polls at recent Democratic Primaries suggest that he's an overwhelming favorite of Millennials (and Gen Zers, the oldest of whom will vote for the first time in 2016.)

Obama was an overwhelming favorite of young voters in the 2008 general election. But of the 60 million eligible voters between 18-35, only 32 million reported that they actually voted.

That's great, for what it's worth. Sanders' challenge is that, even in 2008 when Barack Obama was swept into power with unprecedented youth participation, Americans under 35 were far less likely to vote than Americans over 65.

According to the latest U.S. Census estimates, there are currently about 75 million Americans 18-35 compared to 'only' 46.2 million senior citizens. IE, Americans in the age group presumed to favor Sanders handily outnumber the 65+ cohort who seem to favor Hillary Clinton.

The thing is people over 65 are about 1/3 more likely to vote than people under 35.

It seems likely that if Hillary Clinton is the eventual Democratic nominee, a lot of young voters will stay home; after all, from a purely statistical point of view, they're not committed participants in the democratic process.

That's bad news for the Democratic Party for two reasons: The party fares better in elections with higher rates of participation generally, and Democratic-leaning voters skew younger. You'd think the Democratic Party would, as a result, favor the candidate most popular with young voters.

A few months ago, Ikea’s ‘Chief Sustainability Officer’ made the news when he suggested that we’ve reached ‘peak stuff’. The specific example Ikea’s Greg Howard used was ‘peak curtains’, but what he meant was, many consumers in developed nations have all the stuff they need.

After Ikea's Greg Howard talked about the west being at 'peak stuff' people wondered how that idea could possibly be consistent with the chain's growth targets. Clearly, Ikea can continue to grow at the expense of its competitors' market share. But mature consumers already know that bigger isn't better, and more isn't better.

That was obvious. In the U.S., homes have gotten bigger and families have gotten smaller; you’d think that means American homeowners have more space than ever, right? And yet, storage lockers are a fast-growing business, precisely because people really do have too much stuff.

But if it was obvious, why was it news? The answer is, it was newsworthy because it was coming from a retailer. Ikea, after all, is in the stuff business; it’s one of the world’s largest suppliers of stuff. So it seemed an unlikely admission. And, suggesting that people are consuming too much is almost un-American.

Or is it?

Mature consumers are already ‘downsizing’. Empty nesters are selling big homes in the suburbs and moving into lofts downtown. They’re ditching the massive SUVs and people haulers they needed to chauffeur their kids to hockey practice, in favor of smaller hybrids that get better gas mileage, are easier to park—and, by the way, are way more fun to drive.

The thing you need to understand about peak stuff is, from a mature consumer’s perspective, less really is more. Especially because the older you get, the more you know that nothing, or at least no thing, is really going to make you happy.

Younger consumers chase the latest trend, in the hopes that some brand or gadget will make them seem cool to friends who've bought into the same fad, but older consumers are far more skeptical. That doesn’t mean older consumers don’t want to spend, or won’t. It just means that we spend differently.

Mature consumers don’t want more or bigger; we want better. And while we are less likely to think some thing will make us happy, we’re more likely to spend on experiences. That’s why we account for such a large share of money spent on travel. (The ‘bucket list’? That’s a real thing with us.)

So if your brand’s growth is stalled and you think you’re bumping up against peak stuff, take another look at mature consumers. Want to attract us? Understand that bigger isn’t better. More isn’t better. Better is better.

Rather than making empty promises that a newer, bigger thing will make us happy—promises that we disproved decades ago—tell us why your product or service is better. Make the pursuit of happiness as rational a decision as possible. Better yet, offer us experiences—something we can collect while filling our hearts and minds, instead of our closets.

Embracing the idea of peak stuff is better for the planet and future generations. (Ironically, the longer you’ve lived, more you care about the future!) But that doesn’t mean it’s bad for business. If anything, it should be better.

American astronaut Scott Kelly (left) is 52. His Russian cosmonaut counterpart, Mikhail Kornienko, is 55. The two recently spent 340 days in orbit, setting an American record for time spent in zero-gravity.

Scott Kelly was an extensively decorated Navy pilot who retired from active duty at 48. That makes sense, right? Carrier landings; being a test pilot... that's a young man's game. Except that after he retired from a distinguished career as a fighter pilot, he became... an astronaut.

Kelly turned 52 in orbit. His Russian cosmonaut partner, Mikhail Kornienko is even older; he turned 55 early in their history-making mission.

Fun fact: Kelly was briefly two-inches taller than his twin identical twin brother Mark Kelly (also an astronaut). That was the result of his spine decompressing in space, but the effect is short lived. Speaking of short lived, because the International Space Station is traveling to fast in orbit, Kelly is technically about 1/100th of a second younger than he would be, had he spent the past year on earth.

Comparing Scott and Mark will help NASA learn about the effects of prolonged space travel on the human body. But 50-something space travelers like Scott and Mikhail are not nearly the oldest-ever astronauts. That record is held by John Glenn, who was a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle in 1998, at the age of 76.